A Brief History of Mitt Romney, Total Cheapskate

The GOP hopeful likes to portray himself as a self-made man, who inherited nothing and counted every penny. But he’s his father’s son, and so much of what he has—from his frugal ways to his many privileges—comes straight from George Romney.

Gordon Clay, a teenager looking to save money for an upcoming Mormon mission, received a call in the summer of 1977 from his Belmont, Massachusetts, neighbor Mitt Romney.

Romney, then a thriving financial consultant and top official in the Boston church, hired Clay to brush a fresh coat of white paint on his family’s starter home near the Win Brook elementary schoolhouse. About two weeks into the job, Clay brought in his friend Brick Bushman, the son of the Richard Bushman, the Mormon church’s highest authority, to speed things up. Except for Clay’s stumble from a ladder that prompted a chilly look from Romney’s wife, Ann, the job went smoothly. At summer’s end, Romney cut Clay a check for the agreed upon sum.

It was only later that Clay learned that his partner, Bushman, had received $3 an hour as opposed to the $2.50 an hour he himself earned. Clay asked his buddy why he got more, to which he said Bushman answered, "’I asked for it.’"

"That was the one great lessons I learned from Mitt Romney," Clay, now a defense analyst in Washington, told me. "If you want to get something from him you better be able to ask him for it. Because he is not going to give you anything he doesn’t have to."

The Romney campaign has seized on their candidate’s tightness with a buck as a qualifying characteristic for a Republican vowing to cut spending and bring down the deficit. It can also be endearing trait for a guy who often isn’t so endearing. The crowd at the Republican National Convention in Tampa giggled at a video featuring the jerry-rigged tinfoil flap that Romney used to cover an ill-fitting light bulb in his kitchen’s oven hood. In campaign-approved speeches and interviews, his family and friends call him the most frugal man they’ve ever met. It’s a trait, they say, passed down to him from a father who would rather eat his accidentally salted ice cream than throw it away.

Notions of inheritance and his father’s example loom large over Romney’s campaign and life. He often cites his father’s riches-to-rags-to-riches story as evidence of his own everyman bona fides, apparently believing that his father transmitted him his frugality and work ethic along with his lantern jaw. But in the Romney view, the transfer of genetic material from father to son has not included the advantages that come with being a to-the-manner-born son of an auto ecutive, governor, and presidential candidate.

And that’s where things get complicated. It is Romney’s refusal to allow that he is a son of privilege that has made his second-hand thrift as much a political liability as it is a folksy asset. The Obama campaign has effectively made a prolonged, brutal attack on Romney’s wealth their central campaign message. ("Mitt Romney can sure afford to pay a little more," Obama said in a typical attack at a campaign rally in Milwaukee this month.)

But Romney, without apology, continues to consider himself self-made.

At the surreptitiously taped Boca Raton fund-raiser—better known as the venue where Romney delivered his "47 percent" doctrine describing recipients of government assistance as "victims"—the candidate also had something to say on the subject of his pedigree. He said that though his and his wife Ann’s fathers "did quite well," when they "passed along inheritances to Ann and to me, we both decided to give it all away. So, I had inherited nothing. Everything that Ann and I have we earned the old-fashioned way, and that’s by hard work." The crowd applauded. He added, "I say that because there’s the percent that’s, ’Oh, you were born with a silver spoon,’ you know, "You never had to earn anything," and so forth. And, and frankly, I was born with a silver spoon, which is the greatest gift you could have, which is to get born in America."

George Romney brought his family to Detroit in 1939 when he broke into the ecutive ranks of the car business as a manager with the Automobile Manufacturers Association. As George established himself, his family moved out of its rented home in Grosse Pointe, and into a rambling three-floor house on Balmoral Drive, around the corner from the Tudor Revival masterpiece built for the Catholic Bishop of Detroit, complete with stained glass windows, carved St. Franciscan monks and copper statues of St. Michael the Archangel battling Satan on the rooftops. Willard Mitt Romney was born in 1947, and his mother Lenore grew to tire of the house’s three flights, just as the Romneys’ neighbors grew to tire of the mice attracted by the family’s hobby of raising homing pigeons.

That house is now gone, replaced by a vacant, grassy lot pierced by tall trees and surrounded by handsome estates and cracked sidewalks. On a visit I made out to Michigan earlier this year, none of the neighbors who answered their doors had memories that stretched back to the era of the Romney residence. The candidate himself seemed unbothered that bulldozers had flattened his childhood home. ("It’s been bulldozed now because it turned, I guess, into an eyesore or a place where drugs were being used so they had to tear it down," he said during a February campaign swing through Michigan. "It was a lovely home.")

In 1952, the family moved further up the town’s main drag of Woodward Avenue to a golden brick and redwood ranch house overlooking a stream in Bloomfield Hills. There, amid the soft brown walls and brocaded furniture, young Willard played with the family dog Bosco, took piano lessons and showed early signs of hero worship for his father. In October 1954, a front page article in the "Suburban Scene" section of the local paper, The Eccentric of Bloomfield, paid tribute to George Romney’s rising star and included perhaps the first sound bite from the future Republican nominee: "Does his daddy devote enough time to him and his brother and sisters? Let Mitt, who attends nearby Vaughan school, answer for the other three: ’He sure does!’"

The closest the Romneys came to roughing it in Bloomfield Hills appeared to be George’s pre-dawn half rounds of golf down the road at the Bloomfield Hills Country Club, founded in 1909, "to promote Social Intercourse, Golf and Automobiling." (The present director of the club, which in the past has been criticized for de facto policies discriminating against blacks, declined to discuss the Romney’s and politely asked me to leave.)

Celebrated as the Romneys were within their rarefied enclave, their money was decidedly crisper than the old fortunes held by the top ecutives from Chrysler, Buick, and General Motors perched on the hilltops. And the Romneys were well aware of it.

Phillip Maxwell, who attended Vaughn Elementary with Romney, was himself the scion of a great automotive family. When the two boys were nine, Maxwell spent the weekend at the Romney’s expansive house, on Vaughn and Lahser, which The Detroit News in 1954 said inspired admiring passersby to stop and "wonder about the people who live there." Maxwell reciprocated soon after by inviting Romney to his grandfather’s sprawling estate.

Upon seeing the house, Romney turned to his friend and said, "’Oh gee, I’m glad your folks’ house is as big and grand as mine,’" Maxwell recalled Romney as saying. "I never forget that. What a thing to say."

In 1958, the Romneys moved up in the world and Lenore poured over cobalt blueprints neatly inscribed in the upper-right-hand corner with A Residence for Mr. and Mrs. Geo. W. Romney. Bloomfield Hills. The house’s current owner, a retired automobile ecutive from France, spread the pages across a coffee table in an airy living room. He then showed me the Romney crest in the downstairs fireplace, the den in the back of the house, appointed in brick with a stone fireplace, where young Mitt would find his father reading.

George and Lenore’s dream house, the one Romney came of age in, was a brick and gray clapboard ranch with sliding glass walls and a specially designed staircase to the children’s’ rooms, den, laundry and guest quarters downstairs. Lenore decorated the house with beige, lime and antique gold décor and lots of lamps to compensate for the lack of overhead lighting or sidewall brackets. From the peach and gold living room the Romneys watched a small waterfall empty into a pond, or pheasants stroll around a sloping lawn that George patrolled for burn marks. Lush green hedges, apple and juniper trees bordered the house, and an electronic bell system connected George and Lenore’s bedroom to the help’s quarters downstairs.

Romney went to school at Cranbrook, an architectural jewel of a boarding school, and then left Michigan for Stanford. His own Mormon mission to France was instructive, he later told Charlie Rose, in showing him how the "sort of lower middle-class" lived. He came back home to marry his high school sweetheart Ann in March 1969 and held a wedding reception for 300 guests at the Bloomfield Hills Country Club. The couple, Mitt in tudo, Ann in an ivory organza gown yoked with Venetian lace and topped with a mandarin collar, a lace-bordered train and bouffant illusion veil, stood on a receiving line with their fathers, hers the town’s former mayor, his the state’s current governor. The event made the front page of the Suburban Scene.

Mitt Romney went on to graduate from Brigham Young and Harvard’s business and law schools before joining the esteemed Boston Consulting Group. In the winter of 1977, the same year he had the top of his brick house in Belmont repainted, ecutives at the rival Bain & Company tried to lure him away. Patrick Graham, himself an alum of BCG and one of Bain’s founders, visited the Palm Beach retirement home of George and Lenore Romney. Their son Mitt had graduated from Harvard business and law schools, was married and the successful father of three in a growing family, but Graham nevertheless needed to play the role of college coach seeking a parent’s permission to sign a star recruit.

The Romneys, clad in casual Snow Bird attire, invited Graham onto their small, docked boat. As the sun beat down, George Romney interrogated the consultant for an hour-and-a-half on the different opportunities the two firms presented his son. George Romney repeatedly turned to his son and asked why he would want to leave the security of an established, well known company, according to Graham. Mitt himself tried to explain the differences to his father, but the distinctions were too subtle for an outsider to the consulting culture to grasp. With Lenore listening intently a few feet away, the elder Romney continued to pepper Graham with questions. Finally, Graham landed on a contrast that resonated.

"Sir, you want a difference?" Graham said. "When I was at the Boston Consulting Group, everybody flew first class." He continued that "six seven, eight people, everybody flew first class because it was the client’s money. At Bain, everybody—including Bill Bain and myself, from the top—everybody flies coach because it is the client’s money."

The example struck George Romney at his penny-pinching core.

"It’s a values difference!" he said to Graham, as Lenore nodded with approval. "Mitt, this is the place to go. Now I understand."

Only days after George Romney died in 1995, Mitt—by then a fabulously wealthy venture capitalist and former US Senate candidate—joined some other members of his church to clean up the grounds around the Belmont chapel. As he dragged an old tire up the hill, Romney turned to John Hoffmire, another member of the congregation and a former colleague at Bain, and said, "This is what my father would have had me do to recognize his life."

For Romney, adopting those Depression-era values has been a natural way to honor his father’s memory. But amid Romney’s very un-Depression-era line of work, his car elevators and $10,000 bets, those values can be lost on some people.

Clay, the young house painter, thought the contrast between Romney’s exalted lineage and inherited wealth on one side, and his tightness on the other, didn’t fly. ("What a skinflint," he recalled thinking upon learning he had been paid less than his friend.) For the second house painter on the job, Brick Bushman, who now lives in Kuwait, it made a more positive impression. His memories from the job had less to do with the pay he received than the image of Mitt working on a broken down car he had bought cheap from another member of the church. "He soon had it humming," said Bushman.

And yet Romney’s wealth was never entirely out of his mind.

"I always say the punch line is that it was a good thing it was the old house," Bushman said. "Because the new house would take a long time to paint."

Jason Horowitz is a Washington Post political reporter who regularly contributes to GQ.

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